Increasing competition, deregulation, disaggregation and disintermediation in the financial services sector have lead to a multi-channel financial system that paves the way to the entry of new actors. Among the new entrants, retailers seem to present some special characteristics, enabling them to offer an increasingly wide range of basic financial services. For this purpose, they are building strategic alliances with traditional financial institutions, aware of the growing complexity of doing business alone. As a consequence, their conventional relationships with, and the role of, financial institutions have been modified. In this framework, the aim of the paper is to explore which sorts of relationships between grocery retailing firms and financial institutions exist. Inferring if they are successful or not is our ultimate goal. This intent requires a different approach to the topic: no more a bank-company/retailer-client perspective, but a new viewpoint aimed at blending the two concepts of competition and co-operation in “co-opetition”. In this way, the work sets the ground for its next stage (which is beyond this paper), namely empirical work on the businesses involved.